Sunday watch.

Pricey Pearls Of Wisdom

Our Former Public Servants Reinvent Themselves On The Lecture Circuit

WASHINGTON — It doesn't take long for your favorite public servants to start hawking themselves just like big-time journalists.

Example 1: Lloyd Bentsen.

He's been the former treasury secretary for, what, three hours?

But no sooner does one hear about his successor, Robert Rubin, being confirmed by the Senate last week than one receives a copy of the 1995 color brochure of a successful Washington firm that books speakers.

Inserted into the brochure is a four-page pullout newsletter with purportedly pithy excerpts of speeches by the firm's clients. How about this pre-November election analysis from Robert Novak, the conservative, relentlessly self-promoting pundit:

"Thanks to Bill Clinton, this election could show the biggest Republican gains since the '80 Republican landslide. Can blaming the `Radical Right' stem the tide? The Democrats will try."

(OK, no genius there, but pretty good distillation of fairly conventional views back then-and a lot better than what you'll read in a few paragraphs).

Or how about this wisdom from motivational speaker Tom Sullivan:

"Nothing is more important to our corporate success than the investment we make in our people. I believe the answer to global competition is simple. We must educate, reinforce and motivate our people better than our competition."

(Pretty surprising, eh? Wouldn't you prefer, though, if he went before business groups and declared: "Nothing is more important to our corporate success than making our tough, bright, six-figure executives happy with tons of perks and fat yearly bonuses since our rank-and-filers are lazy, overpaid, unproductive grousers who drink too much, watch too much TV and can't balance their checkbooks, much less develop an effective market strategy. We must ditch as many of those self-righteous nincompoops as possible and get leaner than our competition.")

Or how about political consultant Paul Begala, one of President Clinton's advisers, who proffered this comment on health-care reform, clearly before the November elections:

"When the American people realize that some Republican Congressmen and Senators receive guaranteed private insurance paid for by the taxpayers, but are unwilling to provide all Americans with guaranteed private insurance, there will be hell to pay at the ballot box."

(Oops! So the elections didn't quite go the way he figured. One presumes the booking firm won't return its cut of honorariums Begala received last year from groups that include, according to his White House financial-disclosure statement, the Latin American Association of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association.)

And the newsletter brings word of "new and exclusive" clients, such as the New Republic's Fred Barnes and "Washington Week in Review" host Ken Bode (to think, that PBS is fighting fiercely for its government subsidies while some employees revel in the glories of the supposedly odious free market!).

And there's word, too, of a brand new category of other, less well-known, two-legged merchandise for lower-income audiences: "Great Speakers $6,500 and Under"

But there's more in the brochure.

Falling out into one's hands is a full-color insert that postdated the printing of the brochure and thus couldn't be stapled in. It says at the top:

"Our 1995 brochure features 166 of the world's best speakers, with over 30 new speaker ideas, including George Bush, George Mitchell, David Gergen, and former Mexican President Carlos Salinas.

"In addition, we are proud to announce the exclusive representation of the Honorable Lloyd Bentsen, who served as the Secretary of the Treasury for the past two years."

Obviously, as opposed to your run-of-the-mill greedy newsie, Bentsen doesn't need a whole lot of extra cash. He has, as the Associated Press put it a few years back, "Texas-sized financial holdings."

And he's not averse to asking anybody to pay big bucks to hear him gab. There was, for example, his so-called Breakfast Club in the 1980s. Lobbyists who were interested in the Senate Finance Committee he then chaired were asked to fork over $10,000 to his campaign to have bacon and eggs with Bentsen.

So maybe one shouldn't be surprised that no sooner is he gone than he's trying to profit by his government service.

How much does it cost to get him to spin wisdom at your luncheon, even if he may be regurgitating musings he dispensed for free when on the public payroll as treasury secretary?